Reaper
by Pyralis Anacreon
Summary: Then, after a while, she started to hate everything. This is what happens when you steal from monsters. Reap what you have sown, human.


Then, after a while, she started to hate everything. This is what happens when you steal from monsters. Reap what you have sown, human.

* * *

Her name was Maximum Ride. She was the first completely successful human-avian hybrid. She nearly destroyed the world.

It starts slowly, with grief, and anger. And overwhelming guilt, ripping her heart into small pieces and letting it bleed out. Guilt over _losing him_. He was one of her people, one of her Flock, and she loved him. But the world moved on and she limped along with her second-in-command, and she hurt but still she lived.

* * *

**It is a slow process, unmaking a person. First you have to take everything away from them. **(Fang goes first, and she barely has time to begin coping with that before bam bam bam Iggy Gazzy Nudge. By then she hardly notices Total falling out of the sky. Only her Angel is left, flying higher and higher and falling like Icarus with wings made of wax. But falling up, 'cause Angels go to heaven.) **Then you isolate them, totally and completely.** (It's got a techinical name but she only has time to think coffin before she is stuffed inside. There's water and the weights they put on her should drag her to the bottom but they don't, they don't, and she can't hear anything see anything feel anything she can't even move.

After a while, she stops.)

**Then you take more from them.** (She might be falling asleep, or she might be waking up.) **Their senses.** (She tries to remember - the scent of her Flock, the wind in her hair, anything, anything, because she can't feel and what is she but that which she perceives? And she is perceiving nothing, and she is nothing, and there is no _real_.)** Their memories. **(She calls up the smell of oranges, but it won't come to her. She cannot even envision this color, this shape. She tries to remember their faces, the people she loves, but they elude her. Eventually, even their voices leave her, until all she has is their accusing, unseen glares. Why did you let us die, Max?) **And eventually, their **_**self**_**.** (After a while, she starts to doubt that she is even real. All that has come before was nothing but a dream - and hasn't this proven it? You don't remember your dreams and she can't remember her 'life'. There has never been anything beyond this darkness, there is nothing in the world but her.

Then she stops believing that even she exists, and that is when the darkness closes in, and that is when she knows no more. And that is when it finally ends.)

Except -

_Light_.

* * *

**Once you have done all this, once you have stripped a person of everything that makes them real, you have created something new, untouched, pure.**

**But you have created a **_**monster**_**.

* * *

**

She comes alive with feeling. This is being born again, this is redemption for all the sins of her past. But they - they are not forgiven. Their hearts are black and cold as steel and she hates them, hates everything they are. They took from her what she thought she could never lose and she hates them for it.

Itex must die and nothing will get in her way. She has literally nothing left to lose.

Her senses are raw from disuse, her muscles atrophied and unresponsive at first. But her blood starts to flow and, and it isn't natural, how fast she recovers. They do not expect it, they are not prepared, they are always doing this, making this mistake, underestimating her.

It's very easy to see how, if there ever was a God, he lost control of his own creation. It always seems to be stronger than you expect, better than you intended.

* * *

When she was reborn, she truly began to hate Itex.

And she is not alone. There are people out there as mad as she, who rail against the world that has denied them, and they rally behind her chanting death to the destroyers.

Then, after a while, she began to hate everything.

Itex is gone now but she finds little remnants of them everywhere, in labs trying to recreate her kind. She tells her army to run down every person ever employed by Itex, exterminate the threat completely, and it's better to kill someone who might have worked for them than let someone go who really did. Then she finds the other scientists and decides that science, all of it, leads only to people like her, people who have lost everything.

So she destroys that too.

And it doesn't matter how the death toll is rising, it doesn't matter how people die in the streets she flies over, it doesn't matter how war cries and children's cries mix together, because _this is not real_.

She is the only thing alive and this is her world to do with as she will and she _will _purge it of its evils.

Her world is on fire and she feels alive with the power of it. She wants more. And more. And more...

And everyone is evil, no one is pure. There is no innocence. All of humanity has blood on its hands. So, she decides, all of humanity must die.

And here she is now, their Goddess of Death, wings red with the blood of her bleeding heart. She is the Reaper and the monster under their beds. She stands on the tallest building in the city, watching life and death play out below her, and something returns to her. Something that was lost a long time ago, in a coffin, in a black nothingness. She opens her eyes.

_What is this?_

She began to hate Itex. And then, after a while, she began to hate everything.

_WHAT HAVE I DONE?_


End file.
